Let’s keep on learning with text editor, and the one I use as my default text editor is Notepad++ because I have no option for uworking tith other alternative that I like more, such as Atom or VSCode. That’s not to say it’s bad, as it was one of the first editors I featured on the blog, but in the last few weeks, I’ve been digging deeper to get the most productivity out of it.
to be concrete, I am using Notepad++ for several years, but since a few months, I am getting the best of it. On the other hand, I encaurage you to help me with this blog.
I prefer the portable version
Yes, as with other programs, I prefer the portable edition rather than the installable one. This allows me to keep my personal configuration when updating, and also, to always have my configuration available from USB..
Notepad++ has no trick: you download the portable version directly, from the latest version available (at the time of writing, it is version 7.8.5).
Another important thing is that I have abandoned the 32-bit version, and I have focused directly on the 64-bit version, which has fixed several problems, plus bug fixes, but the most important is the plugins issue, because Plugin Manager was not available until a few previous versions. But now, it is available.
My personal configuration
The first thing to do is to set the language you prefer, in my case, Spanish. Although for a long time, I have worked with a white theme, recently I feel more comfortable with a darker one, also because the selection of words is more evident.
Using some plugins to increase your performance
Here are the plugins that I have activated and at full performance. Honestly, snippets is one of my must-haves, because it allows me to prepare parts of code to work much faster. The key combinations also speed up a lot: copy, cut, paste, move up (or down) lines (or blocks of lines), comment (or remove comments).
Task List is another cool plugin I really use a lot, because you can introduce comments in your code with TODO (because you need to update something), and it will be located easy. This is the way to find where you need to work.
And it is with these plugins that I have made my productivity improve a lot. Although it certainly does not improve Visual Studio Code for Javascript, Vue or Python development.